November has arrived and this year too that means it is Well-being Week at Maastricht University. EDLAB has participated by organizing, on Thursday 7th, an interactive workshop on student well-being at UM.
The event opened with some alarming, yet not unfamiliar facts. So did Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant state that 25 percent of Dutch students has or has had a burnout. Furthermore, the University of Tilburg has reported that 80 percent of their students has experienced feelings such as anxiety and stress.
EDLAB’s workshop did not aim at bringing these statistics down right away. It did, however, place the foundations for an exploratory inquiry into how UM should deal with the increasing importance of student well-being. This event was an informal answer-seeking towards the aforementioned question and these first answer-seekers were UM students.
Over the course of the event, the students formulated, via the means of various exercises, different questions which addressed student well-being. How might UM help in bringing students together outside of their academia, their faculties? Or how can supportive academic spaces be created within the university? The main question the students came up with was: How might UM embrace and encourage more than just the intellectual identity of their students?
Well-being of both students and staff is an important topic of concern. Hence, the dialogue between students, staff and policy makers at UM should remain active. As students and staff will agree, academia contains more than the mere transmission of academic knowledge. Reflecting upon how the university can remain a space in which everyone has the opportunity to flourish and grow is a never-ending process in which achievements are being celebrated and problems are looked at from a solution-orientated perspective.
The significance of a developing and ever-evolving learning environment in relation to well-being is clear. Therefore, whenever you, as either staff or student, encounter a problem, are dealing with anxieties related to the university, or have an idea about education innovation at Maastricht University, then make sure to reach out to EDLAB and be part of the dialogue.
